Vulture Gold
Stories
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Pub Date Sep 1 2026 | Archive Date Aug 31 2026
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Description
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Welcome to a dark country of sadness and wonder. Where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. These growling, prickly-feathered stories blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman’s sins. A boy with a single swan’s wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them is the queen of the dead, who sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones. The characters in these modern fairy tales challenge expectations and norms in a dark and magical shared world.
Advance Praise
“Built upon the bones of fairy tales, legends, and ghost stories, this dark and lush collection offers up a fresh exploration of the human condition through the lens of the fantastic.”—A.C. Wise, author of Ballad of the Bone Road
“These stories, in the deft hand of Micah Dean Hicks, combine the grit of rural living with the soaring speculation of the fabulous. Writing in the rich vein of greats like Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link, Hicks grants us entrée into complex ruminations on poverty and well-being, queerness, gender, and all of the bloody, beating moments that shape the human heart.”—Joe Baumann, author of Tell Me
“Each of Micah Dean Hicks’s short stories is a thin slice of heart perfectly preserved in prose, so that this collection is like a beautifully arranged charcuterie tray of the human experience. You won’t know whether to savor each beautiful and insightful morsel or to devour them all in a blaze of feeling. Compelling, powerful, unsettling, and gorgeous—this is must-read fiction from a major talent.”—Wendy N. Wagner, author of Girl in the Creek and The Deer Kings
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781496248251 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 250 |
Links
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Featured Reviews
Librarian 1257917
This book was so hard to put down! I had intended to read a few other books before picking this one up, but I read the first story on my lunch break and couldn't even think about reading anything else after that. The stories were all fascinating and horrifying in their own ways, and I could not look away. Reading this book felt like discovering fairy tale magic that had been missing in my life for far too long. That being said, these were not fun cutesy fairy tales. They were dark and brutal with no happy endings and no one to turn to for comfort.
One of my favorite things about this book of short stories was that several characters made appearances in multiple stories, apparently having not had their fill of misery. I usually find that when I read a book of short stories I want to know more about a character and what happens to them after their story ends. This book fixed that problem.
These stories were also bursting with creativity. Most of the time I had absolutely no clue what was going to happen next, and then when it did happen, I was blown away. It was amazing. I will definitely be revisiting this one.
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